Martha Laurens Ramsay as An Enlightend Christian

During her adolescent years, Martha was physically separated from her father due to the Revolutionary war, but she persisted on her family education from her father. Unlike girls with less education and less confidence in their own authority, Martha maintained the letter connection with her father. Through letter correspondence with her father, Martha received father’s instructions. As an enlightened father, Henry encouraged her daughter to be “a wise and virtuous woman:”

Let all your reading, your study, and your practice tend to make you a wise and a virtuous woman, rather than a fine lady; the former character always comprehends the latter; but the modern fine lady, according to common acceptation, is too often found to be deficient both in wisdom and virtue. Strive then, my dearest girl, to be virtuous, dutiful, affable, courteous, modest; and be assured that you will become a fine lady.

Henry hoped her daughter to shape her own personality and to be a wise and virtuous woman rather than a fine lady. In his opinion, the former character included the latter, while the latter character was insufficient.

Martha also received political education from her father. When the thirteen colonies in North America claimed their independence, Henry hoped his daughter to take every advantage which the new country afforded for her to improve her mind. For Henry, his duty was to cultivate her daughter as “a woman of an honest and a pious heart; a woman who has not been affectedly nor fashionably religious.” In order to achieve his goal, he would like to alarm his daughter again and again. When the colonies finally declared their independence from the Great Britain, Henry told her daughter that the separation would greatly benefit the Great Britain, as well as the "united, free and independent states.” During the turbulent era, Martha accepted her political education directly from her father. Irrigated by his father’s enlightened and revolutionary ideas, Martha was familiar with political affairs in North America.